Abstract

This study explored the relationship of social change and personality development in a sample of Nigerian
students. Social change was taken to mean people’s perceptions of the trends of social events while personality
development was the manifestations of the Big Five Personality traits which are extraversion, agreeableness,
conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness to experience. It was hypothesized that personality traits will not
significantly be a predictor of social trends. Social change was measured using the index of social trends
developed by the researchers while personality development was measured using the Big Five Inventory. Results
of the multiple regression analysis showed that social change or trends was predicted by the personality traits of
extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience but social trend was not predicted by
neuroticism. Within the framework of social cognitive theory and social Darwinism, the relevance of the
findings to human development and social policy formulation were highlighted.

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